Science and ESP
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Science and ESP

J R Smythies, J R Smythies

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Science and ESP

J R Smythies, J R Smythies

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About This Book

Originally published in 1967. Representing the viewpoints of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, physicists, psychoanalysts, parapsychologists, psychiatrists and biologists, this volume discusses many aspects of ESP. The general theme is that the phenomena is very valid and can no longer be ignored.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135027971

I

‘IS ESP POSSIBLE?’

J. R. Smythies
It is the province of natural science to investigate all phenomena in nature impartially and without prejudice. Among these natural phenomena one finds widespread beliefs among nearly all so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, and in many segments of advanced cultures, concerning such alleged human faculties as telepathy, precognition, divination, etc., and concerning such alleged facets of the human personality as the soul. The study of such beliefs is incumbent on anthropologists and their evaluation of such beliefs lies in the fields of philosophy and psychology. During the last eighty years there has been a good deal of research into these so-called ‘paranormal’ events. Many spontaneous cases have been studied and scientists have developed experimental methods of investigation. Some of this work has been poorly controlled and executed, but some has been very carefully carried out. Evaluation of the alleged spontaneous cases is extremely difficult as Professor Broad points out in his essay, because we cannot arrive at any estimation of the probabilities concerned. There is no way of distinguishing in each individual case between coincidence and some alleged paranormal manifestation. In the experimental work the probabilities are controlled. The results of all this work, it is generally agreed by even the severest critics, have led us in 1966 to the following position. We must either accept the validity of these phenomena or hold that all the workers reporting positive results (in experiments that stand up to the severest procedural analysis) are guilty of deliberate and often extremely ingenious and collective fraud. Professor Hansel, one of parapsychology's most energetic critics, has made it plain that these are the only alternatives before us. The experiments that have been carried out prove the existence of ESP beyond all doubt if, and only if, the experimenters did not deliberately falsify their results. Let us take an example. Suppose some scientists are conducting an experiment in telepathy. Scientist Brown prepares a pack of cards each with one of five symbols on it (cross, square, circle, star, wavy lines) in an order determined by a series of random numbers. This is handed to the agent under circumstances that preclude whispering of information. The agent sits by himself in a room, looks at each card in turn every five seconds and presses a button when he does so. He enters the symbols on a specially prepared sheet in duplicate, puts them in two envelopes at the end of the run, seals one with sealing wax, etc., and hands them to Brown. In another room the percipient is sitting with scientist Smith, The button in the agent's room is connected to a light in his. Every time this flashes he writes down a symbol on his sheet. At the end of the run he prepares one copy which he seals, and one copy which he hands to Smith. The two sealed copies are sent to scientist Jones, He verifies that the seals have not been tampered with and then scores the guesses against the targets. Finally Brown, Smith, and Jones meet to cross-check that Jones has not altered his copies since they must be the same as the copies held by Brown and Smith. Clearly this design will eliminate such sources of error as unconscious whispering, fudging of results by one experimenter, etc., but, equally clearly, if Brown, Smith, and Jones are in collusion to cheat, then they will be able to find means of doing so. Further precautions can be taken, other scientists can be recruited as further observers, etc., but again the claim that all these also enter into the conspiracy cannot be refuted, however fantastic the claim might appear.
However, a psychiatrist should be the last person to claim that otherwise honest and reputable people may not, under certain specific circumstances, enter into such fraudulent conspiracies if motivated to do so. Such motivations as a burning desire to save civilization from collapse by demonstrating the ‘spiritual’ nature of man, or desire for simple notoriety or some obscure unconscious urge could well induce such behaviour. This might indeed have happened in some instances. But it does not seem plausible to imagine that it has occurred to the extent that would be necessary to explain away all ‘good’ positive results on this basis. Hard headed common-sense rebels. Yet, however improbable it is by no means impossible. Now Professor Hansel's case rests on Sherlock Holmes’ dictum that when we have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the case. And Professor Hansel holds that ESP is impossible because it contravenes the order of nature discovered by modern science. Hence all claims to demonstrate ESP must be fraudulent.
What then, we must ask, is the basis for this claim that modern science has ruled ESP out of court ? It runs as follows: The problem of ESP devolves on the nature of the human organism and the channels open to it for receiving information from the environment including other human organisms. Modern physics, it is argued, now presents a complete account, or at any rate practically a complete account, of the types of information channel usable by human organisms (light, heat, sound, etc.), and none of these could remotely be used in alleged ESP. Now it is still logically possible that event A in the environment could induce change A′ in the brain without any intervening causal chain. But this type of causal connection has never been detected under any other circumstances and it contravenes the principle of Uniformity of Nature. The brain is manifestly just a very complex collection of chemicals. It must therefore obey the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry. The only way in which the brain differs from any other part of the material world is its complexity. The human brain is by far the most complex structure, as far as we know, in the universe. Now it is possible that, just as different ‘laws of nature’ are operative when we are dealing with very large-scale events in cosmological astronomy and with very small-scale events in the atomic nucleus, similar changes could become necessary when we are dealing with the very complex. But none of the changes in the ‘laws of nature’ utilized by cosmologists and nuclear physicists tamper with a basic limiting principle so basic as the necessity of causal chains for connecting event A in one place and event B in another place, or if not a causal chain at least something like a gravitational field, or warping of space-time, etc. To avoid this gap in the causal chain one could postulate a ‘complexity field’. That is to say that, whenever physical events are conjoined in a dense accumulation of extreme and diverse complexity such as the brain, then a new ‘field’ is set up by means of which information can be transmitted using this field. In that case a computer approaching the human brain in complexity would also be expected to demonstrate ESP. ‘Complexity’ here could be defined in terms of bits of information the machine could deal with per unit space in unit time. Physics, it may be argued, has not discovered this natural phenomenon because it has never examined systems of the required degree of complexity. There seems to be no logical reason why ‘mass’ or the ‘electrical’ properties of bodies should be the only properties that could give rise to fields. A ‘complexity field’ is even empirically defensible if predictions made from it were confirmed by experiment: for example, if the ESP capacity of a computer was found by experiment to be a function of its complexity.1
It is, of course, very likely that ‘complexity fields’ do not exist. But the fact that they logically could exist would appear to throw doubt on the claim made by Professor Hansel and other critics that ESP is impossible. Their claim is, however, that ESP is impossible within the framework of existing physics. Even this claim can be disputed as Mr. Dobbs does so ingeniously in his essay in this volume, using the sophisticated concepts of modern quantum theory rather than the ideas of nineteenth century physics on which the critics of ESP seem to base their objections.
Then again, the claim could be made that we know so much about the physiology of the human organism and the factors that control behaviour that we can exclude processes like ESP because modern physiology and psychology have shown that no such events occur. However, this claim is patently false. We know very little about how the brain actually operates and only some of the factors that control human behaviour. But, even if we knew exactly how the brain does operate in every detail of its biochemical and cybernetic mechanisms, this knowledge would necessarily have been obtained by the current methods of physiological research in which all parameters are controlled except the variable in which we are interested. The mere knowledge, then, of how the brain functions in conditions under which ESP was not operating is not any kind of evidence of how the brain could function under conditions under which ESP might be operating. Whether or not the brain—or the human being—has any ESP capacity can only be tested by experiments designed to do just this. The brain is
Furthermore, the claim that we can explain all human behaviour in purely behaviouristic terms remains at present a pious hope; or rather a working hypothesis for a certain programme of research in psychology. Much of human behaviour can certainly be explained in terms of brain mechanisms or in terms of ordinary environmental influences. But the fact that it may logically be possible at some far distant date to explain all human behaviour in these terms does not in any way allow us to deduce that this need ever be the case. And, as we have seen, any claim ever to have done this will be invalid unless specific experiments to test for the occurrence of ESP (carried out intelligently and without prejudice) were included in our behavioural analysis. Professor Hansel has mistaken the blueprints of a working programme in psychology for some immutable ‘natural law’. It is hardly reasonable to suppose that man, after some 400 years of scientific endeavour set in a universe with a time span of some 4,000,000,000 years, can have discovered all that there is to know about reality. I doubt if any physicist would be so presumptuous as to make this claim. Therefore it might seem preferable to set ourselves more modest aims. It is possible that ESP is a fact. Can we, then, construct any theory to account for it? The real objection of the neurophysiologist to dualistic theories of mind have been their untidiness. He can present a coherent account of the brain's operation in terms of the firing of nerve cells under the influence of excitatory and inhibitory synapses whose chemical mechanisms are rapidly becoming understood. It is irritating to be asked to add to this coherent and consistent scheme the alleged activity of ‘mind influences’ about whose properties or nature no suggestions of any kind have been made. Unless specific proposals can be made as to the nature of these ‘mind-influences’ and to the nature of their interaction with events in the brain, we are hardly likely to make much progress.
We have seen that the claim that ESP is impossible because there is no place for it in contemporary science is logically invalid. Whether ESP occurs or not is a matter of fact. The best way to proceed, therefore, seems to be to construct as many hypotheses as we can as to its mode of action, to subject these to deductive development, and then to try and decide between them by experiment. How, then, could we explain ESP ? This may perhaps be more accurately phrased as follows. How could a human organism obtain information about the environment (‘clairvoyance’) or from another human organism (‘telepathy’) without the use of any of the recognized channels of sense? The following methods are possible:
(i) By some form of electro-magnetic (radio) transmission between brains. For reasons detailed in this book this does not seem to be very likely.
(ii) By some as yet undetected physical ‘force’ such as the possible ‘complexity field’ suggested above or by the types of operation discussed by Mr. Dobbs in this volume. These explanations are open to the objection that the operations they describe would appear to have no clear-cut function.
(iii) The most plausible explanation, to my mind, is provided by non-Cartesian dualism. Cartesian dualism stated that the world consists of the physical universe extended in space and a number of individual minds not extended in space. Non-Cartesian dualism suggests that the world consists of the physical universe extended in physical space and a number of substantive minds extended each in a space of its own. The totality of each individual consciousness (composed of sense-data, images, thoughts, and the Ego) is located in its own space-time system, a different space from that of the physical world. This theory has recently been elaborated at length by Professor H. H. Price and myself (Smythies, 1966). Two different versions of it are current. In Professor Price's original theory there are no spatial relations between mental space and physical space. The relations between them, or rather between the events contained in them, are causal and temporal, but not spatial. Nevertheless, there is a constant flow of information between the two since the sense-data that represent the external world are on one side of the barrier—the ‘mind’ side—and the physical world itself is on the other. This information, it is postulated, is carried by a non-spatial information channel.
The other version of the multiple space theory was originally put forward by Professor Broad. In this we postulate one four-dimensional physical space-time as well as many individual ‘mental’ space-times (each containing the sense-data, images, thoughts and Ego of an individual). Together these form one single n-dimensional space-time continuum. One cross-section of this is physical space-time and other cross-sections are mental space-times. Thus when we look at a man's brain and ask, ‘Where is his (substantive) mind? (his sense-data, images, Ego, etc?),’ the answer may be ‘In another space higher-dimensional relative to the space in which his brain is’. The physiologist may ask, ‘If you say that the mind is outside the brain, what on earth do you mean by outside? How could “influences” from such a mind interfere with the chemical and electrical mechanisms of the brain?’ He may find it impossible to envisage any ‘psychic factors’ from a non-spatial mind altering the fine detail of synaptic events in the brain in apparent defiance of the laws of physics and chemistry. One source of this difficulty is that it is impossible for us to imagine a non-spatial entity—we cannot form a mental image of it—and this is because mental images themselves are spatial entities—which is one of the planks of the non-Cartesian criticism of Cartesian ideas of the criteria for distinguishing the mental from the non-mental.
However, the alleged interaction between mind and brain becomes possible to envisage if we postulate that the total human organism is extended in an n-dimensional space (where n may be 5, 6, or 7 depending on the particular geometry involved). One section of this space contains his physical body and brain. The other contains his sense-data, images, etc. (see figure 1). The two may be linked by channels of information that can be depicted in the diagram by a series of vectors at right-angles to all vectors used to depict interactions in the brain itself. The geometry of such a system allows for the closest contact between a substantial mind and its brain. In this case, when the physiologist asks, ‘Whence comes the influence that is alleged to act on events in the brain ?’, the answer may be ‘From another space which forms together with the brain space an n-dimensional manifold’. It is remarkable that so few people have questioned so arbitrary an assumption that the universe of events is limited to one single four-dimensional space-time system.
A physics based on this assumption can give a perfectly adequate picture of the universe except (...

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